Corrupted symbols

Kevin Pearson

Posted 22 June 2011 - 11:48 AM

Kevin Pearson

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11 posts

Gender:Male

Location:Winston-Salem, NC

Interests:Mountain biking, climbing and playing guitar.

United States

Hello,
I have had several situations where I saved a map from Illustrator in a PDF format and after emailing the file some of the symbols were altered and did not display as I intended. Of course I found out after the fact because the person I emailed the file to did not know how I intended for them to look. For instance a north arrow displayed as a large J and a star displayed as a small rectangle. One of the files was zipped up, but I am not sure about the other one. Has anyone else run into this? Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
Kevin

J.G.

Posted 22 June 2011 - 02:48 PM

J.G.

Jacques Gélinas

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112 posts

Gender:Male

Location:Gatineau

Interests:Map Design. Map Publishing.

Canada

Hi Kevin,

Not sure (actually I am never sure ) but this could a case of missing fonts that is if the north arrow is a glyph (character from a font).
Take a look at the fonts used in the pdf. If some are unique to your machine that could be the underlying reason.

Posted 22 June 2011 - 02:54 PM

Most likely they do not have the same font installed on their machine and a default symbol is being inserted. Embedding fonts in the PDF used to take care of this but recent updates treat this function differently I belive.

The solution is to create outlines (under the Type menu) before exporting to PDF.

Richard

Posted 22 June 2011 - 07:17 PM

Richard

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52 posts

Gender:Male

Location:Tasmania

Interests:Surveying, Bushwalking<br />As a kid mapping has always interested me.<br />Main mapping is for a local rivercare group - Mount Roland Rivercare Catchment Inc.<br />Use Manifold, AICS with MAPublisher and CanvasX GIS and field book and pencil.

Australia

I often get into problems with PDf''s sent to others, and in many cases I send as a jpeg or image they can read and print.

kingnothing

Posted 12 July 2011 - 11:28 AM

kingnothing

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1 posts

United Kingdom

I had a similar problem years back when building a website. I couldn't understand why my amazing looking website looked so crappy on everyone else's computer. Turns out it wasn't a common font and most people didn't have it installed on their machines by default.